The Wandering Jew

No lengthy meditations tonight of the sort with which I try to reassure myself against that terrifying familiar doubt: a voice that whispers in my ear that my eyesight is too poor for gazing into the distance, my lungs too weak for the rarefied air of the heights. That voice will have plenty more time to luxuriate in its clever turns of phrase.

The life of a young son of the American bourgeoisie is an itinerant one. It is a life of endless endings. The interminable transitions from school to school and from school to that poorly rationalized farce called 'the real world' - which one accepts if one has been properly raised to hate discomfort and fear disgrace - stunt the relationships that the young person establishes with others as well as his/her ability to form, or even conceptualize those relationships in the first place. The awareness of transience underlies every new acquaintance, resulting in an aversion to the inevitable pain that accompanies separation from an object of love. The solution, of course, is not to love.

Modern life thus involves more separations than I can possibly envision in the lived experience of people in the locally-oriented, relatively static past of a few centuries ago (or in the lives of people outside the bourgeoisie).

I am about to move out of my summer accommodations and return to my parents' home. Another onerous transition; another regression into the childhood from which each modern young adult desperately seeks escape. The return home is now the failure of college education, whose principal goal is the transformation of children into adults. When I return home, I will find a fossilized version of me from four years ago still dwelling in my parents' minds. Their conceptualizations of me will guide their actions, and their actions will mold me back into that fossil. That will all end, of course, when in two months' time I will return to college (my god! for the last time!) and undergo yet another painful process of acculturation to new surroundings and to a new social role. I will become again more or less what I am now.

And then it will end, and I will say goodbye to all the people I care about, exchanging promises to see each other again - promises which tacitly admit the impossibility of carrying on any kind of organic, living relations after the separation. A few meetings to keep yet another fossil from disintegrating before we each give up the futile project and let the friendship dissolve into dust.

I arrived through random browsing at the blog of an eighteen-year-old girl whose precocious writing impressed and intrigued me. I briefly imagined an alternate life in which I had met her before I navigated away from the page, declaring to myself that I would never again encounter a trace of her existence. Technology gives us access to far too many of these impossibilities. Our digital flights end with frequent painful crashes against translucent panes on the far sides of which lie worlds that we will never inhabit, lives that we will never be able to live.

"The final reward of the dead - to die no more"
-Nietzsche, allegedly